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Participation vs. OBSERVATION...

"This universe of ours, what is it really? Here we are, centres of consciousness, surrounded by a buzzing confusion which we must try to understand. But we are of the selfsame stuff of the universe -- perhaps ultimately a cloud of energy interacting with other clouds of energy -- and on that account we are in the role more of participants than observers. We cannot distance ourselves from our ambient, hold it at arm's length for impartial scrutiny. This fact has been heavily underlined by modern physics since it sets limits to our knowledge. What we experience is not external reality per se but our interaction with it, so that in a very real sense we are constructing our universe from ourselves."

"The evolution of man is the evolution of his consciousness, and "consciousness" cannot evolve unconsciously. The evolution of man is the evolution of his will, and "will" cannot evolve involuntarily. The evolution of man is the evolution of his power of doing, and "doing" cannot be the result of things which "happen."

-- G. I. Gurdjieff

A Bit of a Bio:

Frederick Woodruff

Astro Inquiry is published in Washington State -- beaming out from Vashon Island. When I was 14 years-old, I made the dogged effort to write to as many astrologers in California as I could, seeing which, if any would take me on as a student. I lucked out with my teachers Ivy Goldstein Jacobson and Margaret Latvala, and studied with them through my high school years. A year later I became a member of Llewellyn George’s Educational Astrology organization in Los Angeles. I helped write, edit and publish the group’s quarterly newsletters... continues

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Black holes. We all ponder their mystery and often our life can feel as though we are living right on the edge of a black hole, shaking, shattering and ready to be sucked — in — to — smithereens!

There’s a scientific term for the edge of the black hole. It’s called the event horizon.

Richard Birkin is a composer from Derbyshire, United Kingdom and he created this video and soundtrack to accompany it. He writes about it:

“Accretion discs are the beautiful tails of a black hole, formed by stars being dragged into that invisible thing that spells the end of matter, the observable universe, and known physics. They’re nightmarish, really. But from this distance they’re beautiful stationary things. By the time we look at them they’ll’ve already spiralled, changed, moved, chewed up who knows how many worlds.”

In fact as you’ve read this entry several stars have already gone down the rabbit hole. Where will they emerge?

You can watch the video above or read about the entire production here.

Several months ago NPR aired a special broadcast that celebrated the 20th anniversary of the photograph you see on the right.

I recommend listening to the report, especially now when the globe is challenged by the largest ecological holocaust in the United States’ history.

Listen, look, and then reconsider the words of the late, great astronomer Carl Sagan. A reaction that he shared with the world after studying the photograph. A photograph taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which at the time was nearly 4 billion miles away, drifting in space.

A photograph which displays, if you look closely at that little tiny speck of light within the band of universal dust, a god’s eye view of: Planet Earth.

Sagan wrote:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every ‘superstar,’ every ‘supreme leader,’ every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Read more

Comments are off for this post 'A Dot Within the Matrix: A View From Vogager 1'

“What about the existential whiplash that comes from being on the moon one week and in your living room the next — and having to find your own way to process the vast gulf between those two worlds? “I remember coming back to Houston after the moon, and my neighbors had a barbecue for me,” Dave Scott, commander of Apollo 15, told me. “I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’ ”